We take pride on language perfection, but even we make mistakes! Any eagle eyes notice our mistake in this video? Here's a hint: spelling German isn't a natural talent of "mein"
This video is very informative and fun to watch. Thank you Mango for posting this up. I'm currently using the Mango App to study Japanese and because of you guys, my pronunciation is ON POINT!!! I can record, listen to my voice, and change my tone/pitch accordingly. After using it several months, I can now listen to a Japanese show and tell it's Kansai/Tokyo dialect.
Interesting, right?! Its sounds and grammar are actually pretty simple for English speakers, and the fact that it uses the Latin alphabet certainly doesn't hurt!
@@kaitlyntagarelli2874 I can only presume there are no cognates and the grammar is alien so it's probably in the wrong category. Chinese is Cat IV but has the simplest grammar -- and no cognates, with many homophones. My Guess if Indonesian is only cat II is because of many loan words.
@@QuizmasterLaw While I try to explain in the video why certain languages may be in certain categories (i.e., what makes them easy or difficult for English speakers), the FSI categorizations are not actually based on features of the languages. They are based on studies of how long it takes English speakers to learn the languages. Indonesian takes about 36 weeks to learn, so it's in Category II!
The tones in Chinese are a HUGE obstacle for learning. It takes many learners weeks to just get used to hearing the tones, and many more months being able to reliably reproduce the tones they hear. Additionally, the collection of sounds in Chinese, are not all intuitive for English speakers to make, including many retroflex (with the tongue curled at the tip) and aspirated (pronounced with a puff of air accompanied with them) are hard for native English speakers to distinguish with similar sounding English sounds. Not to mention the writing system also needs to be learned which can take years to be able to read, as a normal newspaper will require at least 2000 words to understand a given newspaper, and most educated Chinese people know around 8000 characters which they start learning in primary school. Language tests will not only expect you to be able to In contrast, Indonesian has no tones and uses the Latin alphabet, has a very simple grammar with prefixes and suffixes denoting different concepts just like in English. While Indonesian grammar might not be **as** simple as Chinese, it still has relatively simple grammar, with no gender, plurals are just duplicated versions of nouns. The pronouns are more complicated, especially when you start talking about formal and plural versions of you, but these will not take that much time to learn. In short, even if speaking Chinese was easy, being able to read the same amount of Characters is a monumental task, as it requires the knowledge of thousands of characters (which you are also expected to handwrite in tests), which adds to the time necessary to learn the language to fluency. In contrast, while Indonesian has more complicated grammar than Chinese, it is still simpler than French or English grammar and most of the difficulty is in learning the words themselves, as being able to read and write them would not be a challenge once the spelling rules are learned.
We take pride on language perfection, but even we make mistakes! Any eagle eyes notice our mistake in this video? Here's a hint: spelling German isn't a natural talent of "mein"
This video is very informative and fun to watch. Thank you Mango for posting this up.
I'm currently using the Mango App to study Japanese and because of you guys, my pronunciation is ON POINT!!!
I can record, listen to my voice, and change my tone/pitch accordingly. After using it several months, I can now listen to a Japanese show and tell it's Kansai/Tokyo dialect.
すごい！That's awesome to hear! We look forward to updates in the future!
Thank you so much for sharing good contents.
2:13 Goths were WAY TOO COOL to show up for the East Germanic party
Sadly, this language tree had to be simplified quite a bit! Maybe next time we can fit Gothic in! :-)
Is the list/categorization the same if the native language is different?
Great Question @Laura Broder! You will find we talk about exactly that @10:57!
Are the difficulta languages to learn called marked? And the simple or less complex ones
Unmarked??
Yesss!
Indonesian is only cat II?!?
Interesting, right?! Its sounds and grammar are actually pretty simple for English speakers, and the fact that it uses the Latin alphabet certainly doesn't hurt!
@@kaitlyntagarelli2874 I can only presume there are no cognates and the grammar is alien so it's probably in the wrong category. Chinese is Cat IV but has the simplest grammar -- and no cognates, with many homophones. My Guess if Indonesian is only cat II is because of many loan words.
@@QuizmasterLaw While I try to explain in the video why certain languages may be in certain categories (i.e., what makes them easy or difficult for English speakers), the FSI categorizations are not actually based on features of the languages. They are based on studies of how long it takes English speakers to learn the languages. Indonesian takes about 36 weeks to learn, so it's in Category II!
The tones in Chinese are a HUGE obstacle for learning. It takes many learners weeks to just get used to hearing the tones, and many more months being able to reliably reproduce the tones they hear. Additionally, the collection of sounds in Chinese, are not all intuitive for English speakers to make, including many retroflex (with the tongue curled at the tip) and aspirated (pronounced with a puff of air accompanied with them) are hard for native English speakers to distinguish with similar sounding English sounds.
Not to mention the writing system also needs to be learned which can take years to be able to read, as a normal newspaper will require at least 2000 words to understand a given newspaper, and most educated Chinese people know around 8000 characters which they start learning in primary school. Language tests will not only expect you to be able to
In contrast, Indonesian has no tones and uses the Latin alphabet, has a very simple grammar with prefixes and suffixes denoting different concepts just like in English. While Indonesian grammar might not be **as** simple as Chinese, it still has relatively simple grammar, with no gender, plurals are just duplicated versions of nouns. The pronouns are more complicated, especially when you start talking about formal and plural versions of you, but these will not take that much time to learn.
In short, even if speaking Chinese was easy, being able to read the same amount of Characters is a monumental task, as it requires the knowledge of thousands of characters (which you are also expected to handwrite in tests), which adds to the time necessary to learn the language to fluency.
In contrast, while Indonesian has more complicated grammar than Chinese, it is still simpler than French or English grammar and most of the difficulty is in learning the words themselves, as being able to read and write them would not be a challenge once the spelling rules are learned.